Cataluña en la Carrera de Indias, Thirty Five Years Later. What Remanis to Be Done

Abstract

Abstract

The anniversary of the publication of a fundamental work in the Catalan and Spanish  historiography of the Early Modern period , Carlos Martínez Shaw’s  Cataluña en la Carrera de Indias, serves not only to pay a worthy tribute to the author, but also as the starting point of an essay reflecting on the evolution followed by line of research which, opened by Cataluña en la Carrera de Indias, bore its best results in the last two decades of  the last century, but which has currently disappeared from the research agendas of the Catalan universities. Relations between Catalonia and America have thus been left at the mercy of the distorted opinions of supposed researchers. The eclipse of this area of research is not at all due to the drying-up of its sources, and this paper shows that there are practically unpublished sources which would make it possible to extend the time frame of Cataluña en la Carrera de Indias back to the sixteenth century.